CHRISTIAN DREGER, German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Email: cdreger@diw.de
GEORG ERBER, DIW Berlin
Email: Georg-Erber@hotmail.de
DANIELA GLOCKER, German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin)
Email: dglocker@diw.de

The accumulation of the human capital stock plays a key role to explain the macroeconomic performance across regions. However, despite the strong theoretical support for this claim, empirical evidence has been not very convincing, probably because of the low quality of the data. This paper provides a robustness analysis of alternative measures of human capital available at the level of EU NUTS1 and NUTS2 regions. In addition to the univariate measures, composite indicators based on different construction principles are proposed. The analysis shows a significant impact of construction techniques on the quality of indicators. While composite indicators and labour income measures point to the same direction of impact, their correlation is not overwhelmingly high. Moreover, popular indicators should be applied with caution. Although schooling and human resources in science and technology explain some part of the regional human capital stock, they cannot explain the bulk of the experience.

IOANNIS CHOLEZAS, Athens University of Economics and Business
Email: ychol@aueb.gr
PANOS TSAKLOGLOU, Athens University of Economics and Business - Department of International and European Economic Studies, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Email: panos@aueb.gr

Greece was traditionally an emigration country. However, since the early 1990s it became an immigrant destination and nowadays up to a tenth of the population are immigrants, mainly from neighbouring Balkan countries and, especially, Albania. This large scale immigration within a short time period had important social, as well as, economic consequences. The paper reviews the existing evidence and concludes that on average the economic effects of immigration were beneficial, although their distributional consequences were adverse. Greek immigration policy was haphazard and more efforts are needed in order to integrate the immigrants in the economic and social fabric of the country.

SARA LEMOS, University of Leicester, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Email: sl129@leicester.ac.uk
JONATHAN PORTES, National Economic Research Associates Inc. (NERA) - New York Office
Email: JDPORTES@AOL.COM

The UK was one of only three countries that granted free movement of workers to accession nationals following the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004. The resulting large, rapid and concentrated migration inflow can be seen as a natural experiment that arguably corresponds closely to an exogenous supply shock. We evaluate the impact of this migration inflow - one of the largest in British history - on the UK labour market. We use new monthly micro level data and an empirical approach that ascertains which particular labour markets in the UK - with varying degrees of natives' mobility and migrants' self-selection - may have been affected. Our results suggest modest effects throughout the labour market. Despite anecdotal evidence, we found little hard evidence that the inflow of accession migrants contributed to a fall in wages or a rise in claimant unemployment in the UK between 2004 and 2006.

MARK SMITH, Grenoble Graduate School of Management
Email: mark.smith@grenoble-em.com
BRENDAN BURCHELL, affiliation not provided to SSRN
COLETTE FAGAN, University of Manchester - European Work and Employment Research Centre (EWERC)
Email: colette.fagan@man.ac.uk
CATHERINE O'BRIEN, affiliation not provided to SSRN

Promoting job quality and gender equality are objectives of the European Employment Strategy (EES) in spite of a downgrading of the attention given to both in the revised employment guidelines and the relaunch of the Lisbon Process. However, advances on both of these objectives may be important complements to the employment rate targets of the EES, as access to good quality jobs for both sexes is likely to help sustain higher employment rates. While the European Commission has a broad view of the concept of job quality in practice, it relies on a selection of labour market type indicators that say little about the quality of the actual jobs people do. Using data from the 2005 European Working Conditions survey, we analyse job quality along three dimensions: job content, autonomy and working conditions. We conclude that gender and occupational status, along with other job characteristics such as working time and sector, have more influence on an individual's job quality than the country or national model they are situated in. Our results also demonstrate the value of developing indicators of job quality that are both gender sensitive and derived at the level of the job rather than the labour market in order to advance EU policy and academic debate on this topic.

ANDREA GALLINA, Roskilde University
Email: agallina@ruc.dk

In the current European Union (EU) debate on migration despite the positive linkage between Migration and Development gaining momentum, emphasis is still greater on how to guarantee borders security and curb irregular migration. This is possibly due also to the lack of concrete indications on how to operationalise the linkage between Migration and Development on the one hand, and to the existing discrepancies between some individual Member States' political agendas and the attempts of the European Commission (EC) to set a framework promoting development-friendly migration, on the other. Concrete recommendations on how to enhance Migration and Development linkages have been put forward in recent key EC/EU communications, yet they are vaguely presented because of the lack of a comprehensive analytical framework linking the various elements. The present article attempts to fill the existing gap between theories and practice by proposing the path towards a more comprehensive analytical framework that takes into account the intertwining of the internal resources (i.e. migrants' financial, human, social and symbolic capital) and external - the social, political, economic and cultural environment in which these resources can be created and mobilised. The paper is organised in four sections: an introduction presenting the evolution in the Migration and Development policy and recommendations at EC/EU level, a second section presenting a resource-based approach to Migration and Development, a third section on the migration trends in the Euro-Mediterranean region and the concrete utilisation of migrants' resources and a final section concluding and highlighting the potential for regional co-operation in creating, enhancing and mobilising migrants' resources.